Guillermo del Toro to Share His ‘Bleak House’ With Fans in New Traveling Art Exhibit

In addition to his actual home, Guillermo del Toro constructed a second home filled with collectibles, books and inspirational pieces of art. Named Bleak House after the Charles Dickens novel, del Toro was inspired by Disney’s research library to build this creative space / museum / second home, and now hundreds of pieces of the filmmaker’s art will become part of a special traveling art exhibit that will kick off at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

LACMA will host Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters from July to November, before the exhibit travels to Minneapolis and Toronto. The director of films like Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy and Pacific Rim has over 500 pieces of art and approximately 9,000 books in Bleak House, which is divided into themed rooms. In an interview with HFPA about the new exhibit, del Toro gives fans an idea of how the house is set up, and it sounds like a cinephile version of Pee-wee’s house:

This morning I woke up in the Dickens room, which is a room that is dedicated to Dickens, and all the furniture is Dickensian and Victorian, and it’s surrounded by books from the Victorian era (…) and I exited through the Nosferatu corridor by pushing the secret painting on the wall into my kitchen.

In addition to the books — which are divided into genre libraries — del Toro has “about fifty thousand magazines and comics” and by his own count, “five hundred and eighty original pieces of art; acrylics, oils.” Also of note are his “thousands upon thousands” of toys, action figures, statuettes, statues, busts and various collectibles, which he’s shown off in videos and photos on his Twitter page.

So what might we expect in del Toro’s exhibit? His Bleak House pieces include:

…a full scale replica of Frankenstein and his bride; Ray Harryhausen’s Jason’s Argonauts standing in the garden; a bust of Megan from The Exorcist glued to the TV set. And that barely scratches the surface.

You can see more of del Toro’s collection in his book Guillermo del Toro Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions, which features images of his personal artwork collection.

The filmmaker is preparing to head into production on an untitled Cold War romance film starring Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer and Michael Stuhlbarg. Described as “a mysterious and magical other-worldly love story set in 1963 America,” the film will presumably hit theaters sometime next year.